How to beat the binge

The mental health campaigner on one serious addiction replacing another and how she went about conquering it

In the dead of night, recovering alcoholic, journalist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon would sneak down to the kitchen to binge on raw cooking chorizo, beef jerky and bags of crisps.

She would hide the evidence from her family and wake up with terrible food hangovers.

Bryony had replaced one addiction with another, developing a binge-eating disorder which eventually caused her as much pain as her previous alcoholic benders, she recalled.

“I was two-and-a-half years sober [she gave up booze in 2017] when the pandemic hit and I was so relieved [I wasn’t drinking], as I would have literally killed myself with alcohol in the first lockdown,” she said. “I didn’t recognise I’d fallen headfirst into this other addiction.”

The binge-eating disorder, which lasted just under a year, escalated into her raiding the kitchen bin for scraps from dinner out of sight of her husband, financial journalist Harry Wilson, and daughter Edie, then seven.

She charts the episode and other changes in her life in her book Mad Woman, a follow-up to her bestselling Mad Girl, published in 2016, which focused on living with mental illness.

The columnist, who over the years has suffered from depression, OCD, bulimia and drug dependency, said: “Recovering from an eating disorder is, weirdly, far harder than recovering from alcoholism.

“None of us essentially needs alcohol to live but we do need food,” she added. “You can abstain from alcohol, you can cut it out, whereas with food you have to eat three times a day. There’s a great phrase which a lot of eating disorder experts use, which is, ‘Eating is like having to take a tiger out for a walk three times a day.’ I certainly found that.”

The new addiction crept up on her, she recalled. “In the second lockdown, I really became aware that I was stuck in this habit that felt similar to the last days of my drinking.”

It wasn’t about weight, she said. “It was about numbing myself with food. It wasn’t about what I weighed. I knew that if I was going to recover from this, it had to be about nourishing myself and looking after myself, and not about wanting to recover from a binge-eating disorder because I need to lose weight.

‘‘It had to come from a place of love for myself.”

She found a therapist who specialises in eating disorders. To wean herself off the bingeeating cycle, she had to plan to make sure she didn’t get hungry and that she ate dinner with her daughter at 5.30pm. She also re-educated herself to think that no food is “bad”’.

Bryony spoke about it on social media and had messages from people who were having similar experiences.

“People don’t recognise it as an eating disorder, they think it’s just slovenliness. They think it’s a failure on their part as humans but it’s not – it is a clinical thing.”

Cross addiction is very common, she added.

“It’s like whack-a-mole. I got sober from alcohol and drugs two-and-a-half years earlier and then suddenly another thing pops up.”

Mad Woman by Bryony Gordon (Headline, £20) is out now